Renaissance Go-Betweens

Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe

Andreas Höfele, Werner von Koppenfels, Andreas Höfele, Werner von Koppenfels

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9783110182156
• eBook ISBN: 9783110919516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The volume analyses some of the travelling and bridge-building activities that went on in Renaissance Europe, mainly but not exclusively across the Channel, true to Montaigne's epoch-making program of describing 'the passage'. Its emphasis on Anglo-Continental relations ensures a firm basis in English literature, but its particular appeal lies in its European point of view, and in the perspectives it opens up into other areas of early modern culture, such as pictorial art, philosophy, and economics. The multiple implications of the go-between concept make for structured diversity.

The chapters of this book are arranged in three stages. Part 1 ('Mediators') focuses on influential go-betweens, both as groups, like the translators, and as individual mediators. The second part of this book ('Mediations') is concerned with individual acts of mediation, and with the 'mental topographies' they presuppose, reflect and redraw in their turn. Part 3 ('Representations') looks at the role of exemplary intermediaries and the workings of mediation represented on the early modern English stage.

Key features

• High quality anthology on phenomena of cultural exchange in the Renaissance era
• With contributions by outstanding international experts

Table of contents

• 1. Introduction
• I. Mediators
• 2. The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between
• 3. Inglese Italianato – Italiano Anglizzato: John Florio
• 4. Ash Wednesday in Westminster: Giordano Bruno meets Elizabethan England
• 5. De Witt, van Buchell, the Wooden O, and the Yellow M
• 6. John Dee as Cultural, Scientific, Apocalyptic Go-Between
• 7. John Wolfe and the Impact of Exemplary Go-Betweens on Early Modern Print Culture
• II. Mediations
• 8. Hybrids: Learning from a Gilded Silver Beaker (Antwerp, c. 1530)
• 9. British Cultural History and Church History for the Continent: John Bale’s Summarium (1548) and Catalogus (1557–59)
• 10. Machiavellian Dissimulation and Allegory: The Writings of Roger Ascham and Sir Philip Sidney
• 11. Moses as Go-Between: John Spencer’s Theory of Religious Translation
• III. Representations
• 12. Another Country: Marlowe and the Go-Between
• 13. Spirits, Ghosts, Demons in Shakespeare and Milton
• 14. ‘A membrane has broken’: Returning from the Dead in The Spanish Tragedy
• 15. ‘The Words of Mercury’: Shakespeare’s Love Ambassadors
• 16. Incising Venice: the Violence of Cultural Incorporation in The Merchant of Venice
• 17. Iago the Essayist: Florio between Montaigne and Shakespeare
• Index
• Notes on Contributors